LGBTQ
I’ll Take My Metamorphosis with a Little Extra Meta
Change is inevitable, so really what’s the big deal about someone altering their sex and gender role?
The mark of time’s passage, experience, imperfection, transience, and the shadow of previous states are forever a part of existence. Change is inevitable, so really what’s the big deal about someone altering their sex and gender role? Expression of gender, regardless of one’s shade of cisgender or transgender, is just an extension of one’s self-awareness, their knowledge of who they are.
Dogged. Like a Border Collie with a tennis ball. I get engrossed, am introverted and hyper-focused. These aren’t just how I describe myself; they are also how people describe me. Maybe I’m kinda meta. As a prefix, ‘meta — ‘ means, in the middle, between, beyond or a changed state,’ respectively, metaphase, metadata, metastasis.
According to the online archive of common parlance, Urban Dictionary, using meta alone as a complete word in its own right refers to seeing something “from a higher perspective instead of from within the thing, like being self-aware.” To me, that sounds like a description of higher self, the fact that humans are a species capable of observing their own thoughts and deciding what is real or not real, reviewing and changing perspectives and choosing what to do with our thoughts.
I’m aware I spend a lot of time in my head mulling over things, but I watch and observe what I think and then also examine that. I love my fascinations and preoccupations — who doesn't love their interests? I am, introspective and the hyper-focus I get from an attention deficit has always driven me as a creative and I’ve used it to my benefit.
I’ve spent countless hours poring over 1940s aerial photos, Victorian maps, abandoned road courses and train grades. My idea of a great time is to lose track of it in the archives of a historical society and if you’ve perused my other essays, it will be obvious I spend time in the Library of Congress’ online image archives. I go to paper fairs to collect old magazines, book engravings, photos, and Victorian scrap that I scan or use for manipulated collages and shadowboxes, or to copy into my paintings.
I love to restore aged things, especially bicycles, to take them from a state of dusty, rusted, squeaky disuse, and to polish, lube and rebuild them into new life. Often, I preserve the beauty of time’s mark on them because like the ever-forming lines on my face, the faded or chipped paint, some rust here and there, tell a story.
It’s what the Japanese call wabi-sabi, the aesthetic value that the patina of history is beautiful and should be maintained and treasured for the very nature of impermanence, transience and imperfection in any temporally bound thing. The mark of time’s passage and experience, imperfection, and the shadow of previous uses and states, remain an integral part of the piece; the tension derived from the simultaneous preservation and transformation of the thing is what makes it captivating.
In a much less heady way, I find talk show makeovers, fitness transformations, before-and-after images of plastic surgeries, and transgender transition timelines similarly enthralling. Someone was one way, now they’re another — same person, just a different expression of that personhood. This curiosity about change is what has repeatedly drawn me back to Logan Silkwood’s essay, I was a Drag Queen at My Own Wedding. “She” (note scare quotes) was a wife, now he is a husband, and I find that a thing of intriguing power because he is a person becoming a more authentic expression of himself.
But selfishly — and given the nature of dysphoria, I feel a bit guilty saying this — I also envy the femininity of which he was possessed, and I wonder: What if that which makes one a man or a woman, that core essence, was a thing that could be gathered and contained so it could be transferred, traded between interested parties.
Now mind you, I’m not thinking only of reproductive paradigms here. Our sole purpose isn't just to reproduce. Some want to reduce the whole human experience to fruiting and multiplying, but we are all so much more complex than just that. There are people we accept as women and men sans question, people born with undeveloped, missing, or androgynous reproductive organs, those whose secondary traits are atypical, female people who don’t or can’t become pregnant, males incapable of impregnation, all of whom we gender entirely on the way they look and interact in public.
Who and what they inform us they are is determined both directly and through chosen use of gender-coded aesthetics, and metacommunication. And then there are the trans people who fly, un-clocked, beneath our trans-dar; none of these people’s worth as human beings is centered on whether they can reproduce.
Some people, usually the ones who laud themselves the most decent of humans, behave like dogs, running about wanting to check out people’s crotches to identify them — sorry dogs, no insult intended. But despite numerous assertions to the contrary, we are not the sum of a dog’s olfactory observations. Nobody is defined by their genitals nor by an ability or lack thereof to procreate.
No, when I talk of ‘the feminine’ or ‘the masculine’, what I’m talking about is the metaphysical substance, the presence or intrinsic and essential condition of femininity and masculinity that determines the spiritual space and the essential nature occupied by an individual — sometimes it’s an almost equal mix of both.
I’ve often fantasized: what if we could concentrate those essential natures in a jar, amplify and then trade and absorb them so that they effectively altered one’s physicality, caused a woman to morph into a man and vice versa? Alas, thus far, such wholesale transformations without medical intervention and some rare genetic and adrenal conditions are the stuff of myth. Nevertheless, I’ve always thought the fantasy appealing to think about.
Now, before you laugh and wave me off as silly for these fantasies, I am far from the only person to have ever had an interest in myth and metamorphosis, it’s a human preoccupation that goes back aeons and that I reckon intrinsic to us. Ovid, the Augustan Roman poet, wrote extensively on the topic cataloguing already ancient stories like those of Daphne and Apollo, Tiresias, Narcissus, and Hermaphroditos. Then there are modern-day Roman Catholics who believe in transubstantiation, that through consecration, bread and wine take the essential nature of the body and blood of Christ and therefore change substance.
I was a Catholic and can confirm that they mean this quite literally, that despite the fact that it looks like bread and wine, the change is physical and not symbolic because their essence has changed — crossed over (trans) from one substance to another. This makes me chuckle here because even though you can see and measure the physical changes in transgender people, the church thinks them batty for asserting they are more than just symbolic representations of the sex and gender they say they are.
Today, celebrating modern-day mythology and stories of metamorphosis are big business with the likes of comic books, the films based on them, and conventions like Comicon. Rather than Arachne changed into a spider for daring to weave better than Athena, we have Spiderman, who obtained some of the essential nature of an arachnid from a radioactive spider bite. Given an entirely new body, the Silver Surfer became something essentially different from what he was born. In the Watchmen, nuclear physicist, Dr. Jon Osterman is transformed into Doctor Manhattan after he is obliterated inside an intrinsic field generator, only for his atoms to rearrange into a god-like energy being — a transfiguration of sorts. I’m not clear on what an intrinsic field generator is but it sounds a lot like what I’m talking about here, transference of intrinsic fields. It also sounds like a device in the TARDIS — oh and need I mention, Doctor Who is now a woman as are Captain Marvel and Thor?
One bayleaf and a pinch of fantasy
While flipping through the images of a book on Baroque art, my ten-year-old self became transfixed by an image of a young woman turning into a tree. It was a marble sculpture by Gian Bernini, Apollo and Daphne, depicting the ancient Greek myth of how the Grecian Laurel tree came to be. It’s an entertaining story and easily found online so I’ll save the time here and leave it to you to find, here’s an external link .
Such was the impact of the story this artwork tells: I now have a pleached hedge of laurel trees demarking the boundary of my back garden. It’s because, for as long as I remember, I’ve had this idea of changing into a girl so the idea of any sort of metamorphosis, of a change of state, always hooks me with some fancifully disconsolate hope that just maybe, in some bizarro transdimensional turn of events, it could happen.
So, I imagine I pick a leaf, the tree amplifies my intrinsic field and woosh, I’m a woman. Each time I come out back to pick a laurel leaf for a dish I’m cooking, I gently hold the leaf between my thumb and finger, close my eyes and say, “Thank you, Daphne.” Then I unceremoniously pluck it from its branch, bring it to my kitchen, pause to regard the leaf I’m about to drop in boiling something, and imagine myself transforming into a river nymph as a consequence of my disrespect. Indeed, Tiresias was transmogrified (into a female form) (external Wikipedia link) for disrespectfully parting two copulating snakes with his staff, why not me for picking a leaf?
The abysmal impermanence
More than just myth and mystic ruminating, for me, it’s the persistent and natural cycle of deterioration and reforming anew. Change and transformation are the destiny of all that is physical and temporally bound. The specter of that reality, I reckon, is why people are so recently aghast at Madonna’s face.
To hold that anything in this universe is permanent is to lie profoundly to oneself. I am rarely a joyous and carefree beachgoer as I gravely ponder the incessant work of the ocean, its primeval power gnawing the edge of the land. It will continue aeons after those who remember the people who remembered the people who remembered us are gone. It will go on and on, and on. Long after the presumed immobile foundations of our civilizations are worn to dust and blown away, the ocean will persist until the sun evaporates its water and engulfs the Earth.
So, what is it within us that makes us think we can authoritatively define, codify, preserve, or truly own or know anything? I observe the likes of Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, clearly people of above-average intelligence with strings of letters after their names who speak with such learned authority, who are yet still vastly limited. Perhaps they have something of value to offer during the short scholarly flogging of their egos, in fact, I’ve looked up to them, but in the end, who really gives a damn what they believe or don’t? They are talking heads full of their own importance. Talk about limitations, I mean, Hitchens is dead!
…what is it within us that makes us think we can authoritatively define, codify, preserve, or truly own or know anything?
So, why do some so ardently think humans can lock any definition or truth so immutably, that they become virulently angry at the most harmless of shifts in meaning? The egos of men like Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro assume their own gravity as they encrust themselves in the cocksure hubris of what they do not know but think they do.
cocksuredness (external link)
When a cocky son of a bitch is so full of himself you can almost smell the bullshit coming out of his arrogant mouth.
— Urban Dictionary
The idea that practically nothing is wholly black or white, our talk of gray scales and spectrums, of a bride becoming a groom, or my desire to be a woman or woman-like, works them into a right lather. Why anyone beyond myself and those closest to me should even care is beyond me. And yet, despite the fact that change, uncertainty, and death are practically all we are guaranteed, they rage and build their sand castles against the tides of change.
They care, I reckon, because they fetishize their delusions of permanence and the absolute. Some of us cannot cope with the slightest inkling that our tidy wee notions, our flimsy containment of the definite and certain, is itself the most ethereally imagined of all that is impermanent. People change constantly, but no, I break social gender taboos and entertain the idea of a biochemical metamorphosis and people get angry because dammit, there are rules!
Behold the rules — no thanks
People changed lots of other personal things all the time. They dyed their hair and dieted themselves to near death. They took steroids to build muscles and got breast implants and nose jobs so they’d resemble their favorite movie stars. They changed names and majors and jobs and husbands and wives. They changed religions and political parties. They moved across the country or the world — even changed nationalities. Why was gender the one sacred thing we weren’t supposed to change? Who made that rule?
Ellen Wittlinger, Parrotfish (external link)
When I tell people about my gender incongruence and of my glacially slow saunter into some semblance of an embodiment of femininity, they assume it is entirely about clothes, makeup, and hair. But that’s all ancillary. In my mind’s eye, it is about an intrinsic essence and deep presence exuded from within and through the feminine body that I imagine inhabiting. It is occupying the poetry of feminine space even in jeans and a T-shirt, hair high and tight, my body hair unshaven, no makeup, sensible, solid, strong, rational, and because of, not in spite of these traits, profoundly feminine. It is about never having to take myself off and stash her in a closet again. At its core, my longing is to be understood as feminine regardless of what I wear.
It is occupying the poetry of feminine space even in jeans and a T-shirt, hair high and tight, my body hair unshaven, no makeup, sensible, solid, strong, rational, and because of, not in spite of these traits, profoundly feminine.
Indeed, long before cross-dressing, before I even simulated skirts and dresses with bath towels, I was a 5-year-old hiding my penis between my legs in the bathtub. I took very long baths for while it lasted, I could look down and see a girl. In that pseudo-metamorphosis, I hoped that if I willed it, if I had faith to move mountains, one day I would rise from the bath to find only a feminine cleft curving beneath me. To find that my body had actually transformed and become the one I was supposed to have. It was about essence and embodiment for me first, well before I would pull my first real skirt up my shaved 9-year-old-legs.
Trans author, Jennifer Finney Boylan (external link below), writes in one of her books that it wasn’t enough for her to crossdress, to appear as or to be costumed in the habit of a woman, she needed to have a female body. I think it’s from her book, She’s Not There, A life in Two Genders, I cannot find the exact quote.
She speaks of being a woman now and of having lived as a perceived boy. The fact of that physical history is forever a part of who she is, like wabi-sabi, permanently etched in and intrinsic to the nature of her transness and, in my opinion, what makes the fact of her womanhood all the more profound. To claim it, she had to fight tooth and nail against the assertion she had no right — a tide of denial and a void of cultural understanding, to claim it. That counts for a hell of a lot.
The first time I read that dressing the part wasn’t enough, that she wanted a female body, I went back to my childhood hours spent in the bathtub as a ‘pretend’ girl. I thought, “YEAH! I GET IT!” and then quickly shoved the thought away, “Nah, JUST a crossdresser here, I’ve no right to femininity!”
“Nah, JUST a cross-dresser here, I’ve no right to femininity!”
Crossdressing ambivilance
To say, I am a crossdresser bores me now because it barely even begins to describe the depth of my experience. It offers no particular fulfillment, all they are to me are garments I use to try and approximate the sense of the real body I want. Clothes made for women though are cut to a limited ‘ideal’ form to highlight certain ‘attributes’. On me, they create juxtaposition and tension.
I have never worn drag. Its only effect on me is to make me look less feminine.” ― Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant.
I used to think that to say I crossdressed made me edgy, transgressive, and subversive but all they are really are clothes and grooming habits; a costume intended to communicate and help me feel some alignment to something I have not yet physically become. The ONLY reason I ever began doing it and continued to do it was because I found myself at such an early age, possessed of an urgent and apparently intrinsic need to be a girl. Dressing the part was the best I could do to even come close. But again, the clothes hold no power now, they're just my clothes.
In an attempt to mollify the insistence, I’ve come to focus more on the essence of my transness itself rather than feel compelled to fulfill visual expectations and stereotypes about femininity. For years, I’ve striven for the transformational aspect of it to lie within, learning to embrace and love whatever it is that causes this awareness and from that blooms the way I express it outwardly in a very organic way. To date, it’s worked quite well but I want more.
Immaterial substances
So, back to my original wonder. I do often imagine how amazing it would be if trans-masculine and trans-feminine people could simply agree to mutually trade and transfer components of their sex and gender — say via some new technology. Not in a way that you become that other person, but rather that you become a more complete physical version of yourself and in so doing become a more authentic and freer version of you. In many ways, that is achieved through self-acceptance and hormones.
The etymology of the word hormone itself refers to that which sets in motion, impels, and urges instinctual behavior. I often wonder though, what it would be like for my wife and I to trade roles; for our masculine and feminine substance to transfer between us so we could more deeply and intimately understand what it is like for one another. We talk about that for the next life, finding some connection with one another in the fantasy, but what if there is no next life? After all, I think that is the essence of the pleasure in sexual intercourse (or so say the kabbalists) in the concept of becoming one flesh in marriage as an instinctual need to live in the image of the androgynous creator. I think many more people think these things (albeit not as intensely as trans people) than will admit.
Pretty in drag
This brings me back to Logan Silkwood’s essay. It contains a pre-transition photo of him as a bride when he presented to the world as a woman. I cannot help but fantasize that maybe I could have traded my masculinity to possess that femininity because, as Silkwood himself writes, “It’s okay. You can admit it. I was kind of pretty in drag”. He was pretty and I immediately thought, could it have been commodified and listed, sold on the open market, I would have gladly assumed the principal essence of his femininity in exchange for that of my masculinity. I often wonder at the cruel unfairness of it all and I wonder:
What if those of us who wanted to change our sex, could simply agree to swap, to transfer and absorb the substance of each other's masculinity or femininity, and assume each other’s form?
And yet, I also wonder how much of that ‘essence’ is performed and practiced to the point we mistake it for innate and so immutable it cannot be altered.
I don’t mind drag, women have been female impersonators for some time.
— Gloria Steinem, Drag : A History of Female Impersonation in the Performing Arts (external link)
But it isn’t about makeup and high heels. Those are only current culturally marked things that we have been told signal and communicate the often two-dimensional aspects of the concept, ‘woman.’ Don’t misunderstand me, I love those things, but it’s much deeper for me. It is first and foremost about essence and showing that to the world through the presence of spirit and the unadorned body, not simply how the body is dressed to adhere to social norms and stereotypes, the affectations, that society so stubbornly think define masculinity and femininity.
I am an admirer of Julia Serano’s tomboy trans-femme aesthetic and I am certain that if and when I’ve transitioned, I will be a tomboy who is into a bit of girly flair, but not too over the top. Like Virginia Woolf’s main character in Orlando says when she wakes up one morning as a woman, “Same person, no difference at all, just a different sex.” All the culturally-coded femme foof is fun sometimes but like my wife, I’m too into simplicity and practicality to bother with it all the time. I don’t think of femininity as ethereal and delicate, I think it’s beauty and power, solidly expansive, encompassing, and steadfast.
“…if and when I’ve transitioned, I will be a tomboy…”
I love that idea of essence and embracing an inner experience but that is where the quandary and dissonance arrive on my doorstep and incessantly ring the doorbell. As social animals, our place and the way in which others understand and interact with us have meaning. Gender is a feedback loop where we present ourselves to others and they either validate or invalidate what we show and that is what increasingly interests me in hormonal metamorphosis. I’ve lived vicariously for just short of a half-century through the fascination with other’s transitions, fantasizing in the tub, and dreaming of sex swap machines but I think it’s time I made it real.
